4 comments to The World Just Got a Lot Quieter

I am sorry to hear this sad news. I always thought of him as the Yang to Leo Fender’s Ying. He was a profound influence on rock music IMHO. Guess I’ll crank up my Marshall amps as a to salute him today.

Interesting way of putting it. And there is an intense connection between the two. Not to take anything away from Jim Marshall’s amazing accomplishments, but it’s commonly known that the original Marshalls amps were pretty much derived from Leo’s tweed models, specifically the Bassman. In some ways, later Marshall were closer to tweeds than to the Fender blackfaces that were their contemporaries. Obviously, Marshalls went in some very different directions. But it’s fascinating to see how one idea diverged into two streams. Much like like British and American English, I suppose.

The thing is tho’that Leo Fender (and everyone else) took all those designs from the RCA tube manuals. RCA put the tube specs in the front and schematics for their use in the back. The original Bassman was identical to the circuits from that manual. RCA never even tried to patent the designs it was how their business model worked (and it worked well). Most electronic mfrs based their products on these designs. The 5 tube standard AM radio was a good example everyone made them and only the cases were different you didn’t need a schematic to fix them see one seen them all.

Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore International, the company behind the Commodore 64, the single best-selling PC of all time, died on Sunday at age 83. It is a sad loss Jack was a real visionary. I used the Commodore 64 as my first outing at computer based music, I made a cover of Roxy Music’s – “Editions of You” using an early cartridge based music program. Unfortunately the video priority was set higher than the audio priority so it would play random notes late. To solve this I recorded it to a 4 track Teac cassette deck 4 times and mixed it down to one track, this made it sound good and gave it a bit of human feel. I have used a similar technique ever since when writing music on the computer. I later got Commodore Amigas and used my Amiga 3000 with Bars and Pipes for midi composition a lot, I have never found another program that duplicates those features. I still have all my Amigas and the original Amiga 1000 has the signatures of all the creators molded into the under side of the case top including a foot print from Jack’s dog who was there at every stage. The Commodore line had a great impact on all the other computers since in it’s user friendliness and interface. Goodbye Jack you made a difference.